House prices will destroy the British class system

The middle classes will be wiped out in 30 years by rising house prices, says David Boyle, a fellow of the New Economics Foundation think tank. The average house price will reach £1.2 million by 2045, he predicted at the Hay Festival, leaving Britain with a "tiny elite and a huge sprawling proletariat".

I'm not sure he's entirely right. There are a lot of houses in Britain; someone's got to live in them; and they won't all be gilded gazillionaires.

But what is true is that rising house prices will destroy the British class system as we know it. The ability to buy a house and pay for private school fees is now beyond the pockets of all but a very few. And those very few are no longer the British middle classes; they are the international rich. The international rich include the richer part of the British middle classes, it's true. But the big deciding factor now in determining who goes to private school – and, in these unfair times, has a better chance of going on to good universities and getting good jobs – is cash, not class.

When I went to Westminster School in the late 1980s, the children of teachers, academics and journalists were taught alongside the children of the super-rich. No longer – the old, professional, British middle-class can no longer afford to send their children to the schools they went to. I'd say about half of the people I was at school with couldn't pay for their children to go to Westminster today.

With the triumph of cash, the idea of a hereditary elite disappears. Of course, at the very, very top end, the children of the richer bits of the British aristocracy will go to the same schools their parents went to. But the idea of a significant, mass Establishment continuing in the same families from generation to generation – the foundation of the British class system – will disappear, as house prices and school fees take their toll.

Of course, there will always be a class system, as there is in all countries, but it will be one dictated by money, not where your father went to school. A good thing, perhaps – but certainly a massive change.